Blood sisters

The trial of Chelsea Bennett, who admitted fatally stabbing a 17-year-old girl, has thrust the subject of violent girl gangs into the headlines. Angela Neustatter talks to former members, and discovers a disturbing world of exploited and frightened young women

Former girl gang member in Finsbury Park. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

With her winning smile and clear, perfect skin, it's difficult to believe that Amy (not her real name), 18, was once a gang member in the deprived London neighbourhood where she grew up - still harder to imagine that she was renowned for her violence. But at an early age, Amy's life was set on a troubled course. From four onwards she was beaten and raped by her stepfather, who was "a pillar of the community", she says. "I felt nobody would believe me if I told how every day he came and forced me to have sex." She suspects her aspirational mother may have been aware but "chose not to see".

Isolated and unhappy at home, she drifted into drug addiction at a very early age. "I was six when I tried weed and skunk," Amy says, "and the wonderful thing was that they sedated me so that I could block out what was going on with my stepfather. I was coming up for 10 when someone gave me charlie [cocaine] and then I began smoking crack, and that was extraordinary, because we were all filled with this uncontrolled sense of power. I felt invincible, as if no one would ever break me again. Getting these drugs became the focus of my existence, and I turned to crime to do it." At 12, she began hanging out with boy gangs, matching her male peers when it came to fighting, violent robbery and carrying weapons. "When you harbour as much pain as I did, you are constantly in survival mode," she says. "Your emotion becomes physical."

According to the Youth Justice Board, there has been a 25% increase in offences committed by girls aged 10 to 17 over the past three years - with a 50% increase in violent offences. The issue was brought into sharp focus this week in reports of the trial of Chelsea Bennett, 19, who admitted stabbing and killing Sian Simpson, 17. Bennett was cleared of murder, having argued that she acted in self-defence. Police reports of the crime noted that there had been between 12 and 30 girls at the scene in Croydon, south London, when the killing happened in June last year - Simpson's death had apparently come after hours of escalating tension between two groups of young women.

In recent years, there have been many other reports of increasing girl violence: the story of the two teenage girls who bound 71-year-old Lily Lilley's mouth, pushing her false teeth down her throat before throwing her into a canal; the 15-year-old girl who filmed West Yorkshire man Gavin Waterhouse being beaten to death by two boys; the teenage girls who shouted, "Kill him! Kill him!" as a group of boys chased and stabbed 16-year-old Kodjo Yenga to death in Hammersmith last year. Then there was the gang of teenage girls who are believed to have posted a liquid-based bomb into the home of Charlotte Anderson in May, after arguing with her over a love interest.

Susan Batchelor, at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow, has done several studies on girls and violence and points out that female gang members are still a rarity - their male counterparts commit 80% of all gang-related crimes. It is important not to overemphasise girls' violence - but it does help to recognise that gender plays a large part in criminal identity, and is potentially the key to helping people change. "Powerlessness defines the experiences of most young women who turn violent," says Batchelor, adding that they have often experienced, "high levels of abuse of all kinds. They believe they have no value except for their sexuality. The women's movement has not reached their consciousness."

Juliana, 21, traces her descent into violence to a horrific attack during her childhood. When she reported this to the police, they did nothing, and soon afterwards, severely depressed, she slashed her wrists and took pills. Juliana had been a high achiever, but she dropped out of school at 15, and by that point, she says: "I had no fear and no care. After the attack, my mother didn't know how to support me. She seemed to reject me. My father had died when I was seven, and I felt full of hatred." Teaming up with a small group of similarly disaffected girls, she found that fighting other young women was an outlet for her rage. It also won her attention from the male gang members in the East End of London, where she lives. "They were fighting all the time and I was accepted because I was tough too. It was a gang of about 20. I remember walking through Stratford shopping centre and some girls looked at us in a funny way, so we set about slapping and kicking them, and took their phones. It left us feeling very superior. The point was that we were there to support each other, so we would call the troops to help if we wanted someone beaten up."

Juliana genuinely enjoyed fighting. "I kicked people in the head. I wanted to beat them so they woke up next morning feeling bad. Then I started hanging out with older boys from the area, and they were fighting all the time. If someone in the group had a problem, the word went out and we would go and sort it out ... I remember one person we hit to the ground, her nose was bust, and we just kept on kicking and punching. We left her on the ground.

"I was a very angry person," she says, "but I didn't want to do permanent harm. I never carried a knife and I wouldn't have wanted to kill. It was recreation." Juliana was arrested for common assault, actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm, and was sent to prison at 17. When she got out she became involved with a male gang member and had his child. He beat her badly and was sent to prison soon afterwards. She was left homeless, angry and depressed.

In Amy's case, as her gang activity increased, she strove to be equal to the boys. "I could be even tougher, more savage than them," she says, "because I had to prove myself. I got into every level of violence - there was nothing a boy would do that I wouldn't match. I didn't care what I did: as I saw it, everyone judged me as bad, so I'd be bad. By doing that, I got what felt like respect, although I can see now how badly the boys treated me sometimes." She hid the boys' weapons, gave them alibis, ran their drugs, and had sex with them as and when they chose. "When you are as desperate as most of us are in that situation, you do anything to get what feels like love," Amy says. "The boys would treat us as their bitches, phone whoever they felt like fucking, order them to come over, and most girls would drop everything and do whatever was wanted." She regularly found herself washing the blood from her boyfriends' jeans.

Amy explains that she never saw other women as friends: "We were brought up in a culture that sets women in competition against each other, and in the mixed gangs we competed for who could sleep with the most powerful boy." But despite this mutual distrust, Amy was also part of an all-girl pack of "associates" with whom she would go out and fight. This group would harass other girls on the streets "because they had nicer shoes, better earrings than we did, or because we didn't like how they were with boys".

Dinah Senior has spent the past four years working with gang members for the InVolve charity in Lambeth, south London, and last year set up the charity's Little Miss Raw project for girls, which helps them to assess their lives and start making changes. Senior says that girls can have very different roles in mixed gangs: "There are the girlie-girls who dress very provocatively, wear lots of bling and makeup and are expected to sleep with any and every gang member, although their ambition is to be chosen by the leaders of the pack. This way they are protected from gang rape, and they get free weed and trainers. But once the gang is bored of them sexually, they are labelled whores and kicked out. Most end up addicted to crack, selling sex on the streets."

Others tread the opposite path, taking on masculine traits. "For these girls," says Senior, "being regarded as one of the boys is all-important ... They don't usually sleep with the boys, but pimp for them, being paid to bring girls to them. There's not an ounce of sisterhood or compassion."

Much like male gang members, girls tend to join up for a sense of identity and also because it is the best way of being protected if you live on a dangerous estate. Then there's the companionship. As Amy says: "The gangs I joined seemed the only people in the world to offer a kind of comfort and caring. The desire to feel wanted and included, in a world that seemed to regard me as scum, was very powerful."

This explains the strong allegiance girls feel to their gangs, but this can come at a high price, says David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University. Children who have grown up in difficult social situations and poverty "don't see the adult world as there to support them", he says, "so they turn to each other. It's a situation that makes the girls more needy of boys in their peer group, who may not treat them very well."

In a shabby but sunlit room in the heart of Hackney, Peaches Empress, 32, sits with Candy, 17, and Carleesha, 16. Both girls have been involved with street gangs and are here taking part in the RealityBytes programme that Empress set up after her own stint in prison as a 20-year-old. Empress credits her impressive turnaround to Clean Break, an organisation that works with women in the criminal justice system, using drama and education to help with their rehabilitation. RealityBytes similarly uses art, drama and motivational work to help young people at risk and in trouble.

Candy says that she had taken to "robbing with my girl gang", and that she thinks "girls are doing as much stuff as boys these days. There was a time a man was being rude but when I turned on him he got some boys to beat me up. I don't understand why we should respect them if they don't respect us, and they don't." Carleesha says that she put up with ferocious beatings from her boyfriend, and saw no way out until the day she snapped and summoned her all-female "group" for support because she had decided to stab him.

Another girl I meet is Abigail, 16, who is attending Fairbridge, a centre that supports young people who are out of education, and has been working with the pioneering theatre company, the Grassmarket Project, on an improvised drama based on the experiences of disaffected young people. She lowers her glittering eyelids and puts a hand to her piled-high hair as she speaks about her past, about how her anger made her lash out, and how she sometimes felt like killing someone - anyone - just to release her pain.

Abigail says that her life hasn't been as bad as many people's, although as she talks about her father's death when she was four, it's clear that it hasn't been easy. The boy gangs she hung out with were a comfort, and they encouraged her to act out. "I carried a knife just to look after myself," she says, "and to scare people. Or if someone was pulling a knife on the boys, I had to pull a knife on them. We kicked people off buses for looking at us wrong. I recorded people being beaten up on my mobile. I was involved in beating up plenty of people myself.

"Being in a gang is an occupation for so many of the members," she continues, "but I started thinking how many older people are there, and it's frightening to think how many are dead or in prison." Since starting work with the Grassmarket Project, Abigail has decided she wants to study drama.

Amy and Juliana have also left gang life behind, and credit Senior and the Little Miss Raw programme - which involves group counselling over the course of 16 weeks - for giving them the strength to do so. Juliana gives a big belly laugh as she describes the change in her, saying that she is "cocky-cocky now. I really like myself - enough to have entered the Miss African Beauty 2008 finals, and I came fourth. And in the MTV Euro model search, I got sixth place. I work in a bar to earn some money and I have had a boyfriend since January and we haven't yet slept together because I respect myself enough to say I'm not ready."

"Going through the process," says Amy, "I began to see why my anger was unresolved, and from there I began to think about who I am, what there is about me that is worthwhile. There is no way I would go back to gangs even though getting out is dangerous. I refuse to be scared and give them the power."